


a narrative shape concealing the real thing inside

by ncfan



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Body Horror, Existential Angst, Friendly reminder that the Cult of the Lightless Flame is a CULT, Gen, Introspection, POV Female Character, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, and that Agnes's ability to ignore/disobey them is limited at best
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-28
Updated: 2019-05-28
Packaged: 2020-03-26 12:54:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,603
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19006207
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ncfan/pseuds/ncfan
Summary: You live with the infection of the divine, and you do not know when you began to call it such in your heart, for you were always raised to be secure in the knowledge that it was a blessing. Holiness has chosen you, Agnes; you are filled with holy fire and holy rage and holy destruction, and the touch of the divine upon your form enables you to make reality what was before only a hopeless dream for your holy family.





	a narrative shape concealing the real thing inside

**Author's Note:**

> Title taken from and inspired by ‘[The Pentecostal Serpent](https://bittersoutherner.com/the-pentecostal-serpent#.XO2q4497lEY).’ The snake reminded me of Agnes.

You live with the infection of the divine, and you do not know when you began to call it such in your heart, for you were always raised to be secure in the knowledge that it was a blessing. Holiness has chosen you, Agnes; you are filled with holy fire and holy rage and holy destruction, and the touch of the divine upon your form enables you to make reality what was before only a hopeless dream for your holy family.

Holy rage.

They do not call it that when they speak of you, in those shadowed places where they think you cannot hear.

In the first few years of your life, that which you can remember and is more than a haze of smoke and anger, Eugene calls you a brat more times than you can count. Your rage is holy, and yet it is unmanageable and unseemly and _it is a problem, Arthur, that she keeps killing our people with her fire_.

You are quiet, for you often know not what to say, and when your rage takes you it is the inferno of a forest fire in the driest summer, setting everything it touches alight, without boundary or stumbling block, unstoppable and unquenchable. When your rage takes you, you do not know yourself. You are someone else when the rage takes you, someone not to be withstood or gainsaid. It is only when the rage is tamped down to a low simmer (never gone, never entirely gone, the holy fire that burns within you will never go out, or so you think, in your early years) that you know yourself again.

You don’t remember much about the rage, don’t remember much of what you do or say or feel in the grips of the rage. If this is holiness, if this is divinity, you’d think it would leave a stronger impression upon you.

When you are still young, they send you to the house of an avatar of a different, rival god to cleanse it of its impurities and make it a haven of your own dear, dread god. Or perhaps they were simply trying to be rid of you. They have a purpose in mind for you, but you have still heard the whispers that escape the lips of some, and you cannot help but wonder…

But this will be a place for the Lightless Flame, and never again the sanctuary of the Mother of Puppets, and you will not let doubt touch you.

It is not what you expected. You look into the face of Raymond Fielding and search for the touch of the divine, and you see nothing that you recognize. Where you expect divinity, you see only the void of a man whose body was long ago hollowed out for the home it must provide for the thousands of crawling things that live inside of him. This is no holy man, no prophet, no truth-speaker in a world riddled with lies and sin. This is a hollow man stuffed with cobwebs.

And the hosts he has chosen for his spiders are another matter entirely.

They did not choose this. _Here_ , you see the obliterating touch of the divine, and they made no choice at all to become the homes for the pulsing eggs and squirming larvae that form such twisted lumps under their dead skin. Divinity settled upon them, made a home of their flesh and a ruin of their lives, stripping them so utterly of any meaning and any will that they are bereft even of the ability to enact the will of their cunning god in this world.

You begin to think, really think, of all the tales you have ever been told of your birth. The others, Arthur and Diego and Elizabeth and Lucia, they love recounting the tale. You can see it all, the pyre, the crown of thorns your mother wore, the inferno that destroyed acre upon acre of forest, your mother, your mother’s burning, disintegrating body, as if you witnessed it all yourself. Berenice used to tell you the story as a lullaby, to send you off to sleep.

And there, in the center of it all, was you, a baby baptized in obliterating flame. Chosen.

When you said you did not know when you began to think of your divinity as an infection, you were wrong. You were lying. You know where. You’ve always known where. In this house on Hilltop Road, in this stronghold of the Web where walls seethe with spider webs and spider eggs, you see yourself reflected not in Raymond Fielding, hollow Raymond Fielding stuffed with cobwebs, but in the spider egg sacs that moan and twitch before they never move or make a sound again, and you begin to question that which you never before questioned.

(There will come a time, later, when those who know you will blame it all on a boy you met in a diner. They are wrong. That relationship only made sprout what germinated in you long ago.)

This house changed you. You will not understand how much it changed you until later. Small mercies.

But you know this much: in this house, you come to long for connection in a way you never have before. You were isolated, when you were in the care of the cult—they had never allowed you out into the world unsupervised until they sent you to this house on Hilltop Road. You never felt your disadvantage, but here, you feel it so keenly it sometimes threatens to eclipse your fire.

So many cats and dogs wander over to the house after you take custody of it. Once, there comes a young boy. You are not supposed to, but you try, you try to tamp down your fire. You try to be good enough to touch without burning. But there is no one unconsecrated who can withstand the touch of the divine. There is screaming for a moment, but only for a moment, and then, not even bones are left behind. Barely even ash, and these are the first years you shed that do not stem from rage.

As far as the cult is concerned, burning the house will serve as the cure for all ills. All they fear is that you may be influenced by the Web in some way; the hand concerns them, and they did not see the cold seed that has taken a place next to your fiery heart. The hand is a small matter, but they do not believe you. And oh, the burning is cathartic, but it is not what they had hoped it would be. Not what you hoped it would be.

The years pass by in a haze. You do as you are told, and you wonder what would happen if you didn’t. If you didn’t take the candles, if you didn’t stay put like you were told and you actually went out and risked yourself, would you feel different? If you went out and tried to replicate the experience of those who joined the cult as adults, would you still feel this way? Would you feel as if you had chosen divinity, would divinity still feel like the infection that sinks in its roots and twists everything you are to its own designs?

What would they do to you, if you disobeyed them? Kill you? You’re not certain they _could_ kill you; even Diego and Arthur have, at times, shown discomfort in your presence when your fire is unveiled. But disobedience must be punished, and you have witnessed that punishment carried out—it’s always played to a group audience, the punishment of the unfaithful. Even without death as the remoted possibility, _pain_ is a possibility, and you have ever shied away from pain.

So you spend years as a fly trapped in amber, as a doll in a glass display case, as a woman caged in a pedestal so high that you can see no sign of the ground, and if you ever tried to jump, you would must surely die. If you were ever handed the key to your cage, you do not know that you would escape.

You stay on that pedestal, and ossify. The life you thought you would have, any life you could possibly have, never begins. The infection spreads, your divinity feels more you than you, and no matter how you search within yourself, you’re not sure what is you, and what is holy fire.

By the time the Archivist comes to you, you cannot find it in yourself to burn her, in spite of all that she has done. The woman is a font of arcane knowledge, and you have so many questions to ask, that rendering her tongue to ash would be a loss unbearable.

You look into the Archivist’s face, and search for the infection of the divine. You find only cold gray eyes that know more and see further than they should, a thin, pinched mouth, and the hardness of one who has paved her path with the bones of those who opposed her.

“Could I have ever done it at all?” So many questions, and that is the only one you can find the words for. This, when it is the least pressing question of all.

The Archivist shakes her head. “No,” she says matter-of-factly. “You cannot enact an apocalypse on behalf of a god you never chose.”

And unencumbered by the infection of the divine, she leaves you to the emptiness of a holy life that can never achieve any kind of culmination.


End file.
